by Kelly Harms
I shake my head, feeling the despair I see on his face. “But I didn’t, not really. I had a guy who played the game with me, until he got far enough in his career to realize he didn’t have to play the game anymore. I had a fiancé who left me in private and then extorted me for money to keep up the public charade.” I see a flash of light and look to the side. There’s a woman filming me on her phone. I want to shout at her, demand my privacy, but what illusion of privacy can I pretend to defend? “I had my family,” I say to Tucker, thinking of Andy, somewhere, just out of sight, wishing he could just be here now, just for ten minutes, just his hand on my shoulder to tell me I am real and all this, the hacker, the ex, the feed, is not. “My mom,” I correct, because as much as I’ve tried to forget it, Andy is gone. “But I didn’t know it.”
Tucker takes a step closer. I don’t have the energy to step away. “I’m sorry, Mia,” he says again. “I’m sorry I wasn’t who you needed me to be.”
“I’m sorry too,” I tell him. “I used you too. When you proposed, I never should have said yes.”
Now I do feel a hand on my shoulder, and for a second I think, Could it be? But when I turn, it isn’t my brother standing there. It’s Dewey. My heart floods.
“Mia,” he says. “Are you ok?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know,” I tell him, though I am certain that having him here now can only be a good thing. “I’ve been hacked,” I say, “and I don’t know anymore where I stop and this version of me”—I wave the phone helplessly—“begins.”
Dewey takes the phone from me and wraps me up in his arms, and I think, just for that tiny moment, that everything is going to be ok somehow.
But then I hear a small voice behind me, and I turn around and see the girl. The bandaged girl from before, in her high teens or low twenties if I had to guess. Jessica. Next to her is a woman, midthirties, with bike-helmet hair. The pair look like sisters, or maybe young mother and daughter. I recognize the protective stance of the older one with a twinge. It’s the way my mother stood at Andy’s memorial, between me and the fact of his death. They’re both looking at me, the older in panic, the younger with expectation.
“I’m sorry,” I say, pulling out of Dewey’s arms. “What did you say?”
“I said,” she calls, raising her voice so it’s clear above the small crowd, the few passing cars, the wind off the mountains, “what do you mean, hacked? You weren’t hacked at all. You knew exactly who was posting. You were the one who paid her to post.”
PAIGE
“What do you mean, hacked?”
As we walk out of the Sleepy Bear into an unusual snarl of people on the otherwise empty sidewalk, I hear my sister speak, and I think, This isn’t good, and then I realize this is worse than bad. This is a disaster. Mia is standing there, and Tucker, and Tim back from the bike shop, and some other guy I’ve never seen before, with one hand falling slowly off Mia’s back, the other holding a phone and scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Scrolling the sky down on top of my head.
“I didn’t pay anyone to post anything,” Mia says loudly as Jessica steps toward her. “I do all my own posts. I have never hired a ghoster in my life.”
Jessica shakes her head. I reach for her arm, but she pulls it back. “I’m sorry, Mia, but you must be forgetting,” she says, her voice a bit lower, even now still trying to keep what she thinks is this woman’s secret. “You’ve been using one for a week now. You used my sister. Tell the truth. People will understand.” She looks back at me with pleading in her eyes. “Paige?” she asks. I can only shake my head slowly. My voice is gone.
“But it is the truth,” Mia says, to me and Jessica and anyone else within a hundred feet. “I didn’t hire anyone to post for me. I’ve been hacked,” she says, and once more for good measure: “My Pictey account has been hacked. I would never say the things the hacker posted. It’s clearly someone trying to sandbag me, some troll who makes it their life purpose to torture people on the internet.”
“My sister is not a troll!” Jessica cries, a wild look in her eyes. “You may not like what she posted, but you can’t just sell her out like this. You’re supposed to be a good person. Stand by what you did.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Mia says. “I don’t even know who your sister is.”
I will myself to say something, to move, but I’m frozen, ice and panic mingling in my veins. “She’s Paige Miller!” I hear Jessica cry. “You hired her! You must at least sign her checks!”
I force my arms to rise and grab hold of Jessica’s arm again, but again she wrenches it free. “Jessica,” I hear myself say, as if from a great distance. “No, Jessica. Leave her be.”
Mia rounds on me. “Are you her sister?” she demands. “Are you Paige Miller?”
I don’t know where to look. Not at Jessica, to be sure, but not at Mia either. I breathe in, hold it, breathe out. “Yes,” I say at last. “That is my name.”
“Is this your post?” Mia waves in the general direction of a phone. “Did you write this?” she asks me.
Slowly, blinking too fast, I say, “Yes. I did.”
“Who the hell even ARE you?” she cries. “Why would you hack my account and ruin my feed?”
I shake my head frantically, words gone again. My eyes shift from Mia to my sister and back to Mia again. I will Mia to just shut up, just leave things be, just let us go and forget this ever happened. I will Jessica to understand.
“Why did you do this?” Mia asks me again. “I have spent years of my life creating this community,” she tells me. “This is how I make my living. This is how I make a difference in the world. Why would you torpedo it like that? Just because you can? Because my password didn’t have enough random numbers in it? Why would you take such advantage?”
I open my mouth to find something to say, anything, but Tucker cuts her off. “Mia,” he says softly. “Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe this is your way out, if that’s what you want.”
“It’s NOT what I want!” Mia whirls around on Tucker in distress. “I don’t know how else to explain this to you: I am not just posting constant selfies because I’m some vain idiot. I have something to say! And this is the platform I’ve been given to say it in. Do you have any clue how lucky I am to have—to have had—half a million followers? Do you have any idea what a difficult accomplishment that was?” She turns back to me. “And do you?” she asks. “When I posted that I was going offline for a while, did you think that I actually meant, Would a complete stranger please start impersonating me and then tell all my followers to, what, ‘just get off social media for pity’s sake’?” She laughs an angry bark. “Because if so, in what universe would I ever use the phrase for pity’s sake!?” She shakes her head angrily and then turns to my sister. “You said you’re a longtime fan of mine. How could you not see that that post was fraudulent?”
“You’re the one who’s fraudulent,” Jessica says, even as I try to pull her out of this fray. “You hired my sister knowing what she’d do. And then you paid her to post, knowing full well that she hated the very idea of influencers. Maybe you didn’t directly tell her to write exactly this, but you knew what you were getting with her. You knew it would happen.”
Mia, too, reaches out to my sister. Her face softens, and when she shows her kindness, my heart cracks in two. “Jessica, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for whatever you’ve been through. I can see it’s been a lot. But I need you to understand: I never hired your sister. I don’t know how she got my password. I do know she’s committed a crime by hacking my account and probably cost me thousands of dollars in revenues too. I know that what she did could land her in jail.”
Jessica shakes her head. “That’s not true,” she says. She turns to me, eyes full of tears. “Paige?”
I shake my head desperately. Trying to, what, deny this? I cannot. “Jessica,” I beg. “I was going to tell you.”
But she is inconsolable. “Why would you do this, Paige?” she cries. “Why would you tell me all these li
es? Right now—when things have been so hard?”
“Please, Jessica. I didn’t mean to hurt you,” I say.
But Jessica, the loyal little sister who couldn’t get me to stop spinning the merry-go-round, who I left behind to save myself, who had to learn on her own, because I did not teach her, about the place between the bridge and the water, has turned back to Mia. Her eyes are like little shiny points of fire. “I don’t care what you say, Mia Bell. You are a fraud,” she spits out angrily. “And you know it. You told everyone that you were married, to that guy,” she shouts, pointing at Tucker. I wince at the loudness of her voice, the manic tone. “But I know for a fact,” she goes on, “that he jilted you at the altar. And now I know why he did it! Because you’re nothing but a liar and a fake.”
In shock, I drop Jessica’s arm. Mia’s mouth falls open. I stammer around for what to say, hopelessly, but Jessica is already shoving past me in the opposite direction of the coffee shop, heading for the ski hill.
I look anxiously in the direction she moves, about to take off after her, but Mia points at me sharply. “Don’t even think about moving an inch,” she says, “or I’ll call the police.”
Tucker’s eyes widen. “Mia, you don’t need to call any police,” he says. “This is probably all some big misunderstanding.”
“I’ll tell you the misunderstanding,” I hear myself say. “I misunderstand how you could let people on your feed believe so many lies about you, lie after lie after lie, while they were desperately begging you for help. While their lives were in jeopardy. I misunderstand how you can stand here threatening me with jail time when any fool can see my sister is in danger.”
I look at this woman, who has done nothing and everything at once, and sneer. “Why don’t you go back with Tucker, Mia? Go back with him, go back to posting, go back into your make-believe world where everyone loves you and you’re married and it was a beautiful ceremony—even though it never really happened. Enjoy yourself there. You don’t deserve the real world.” I turn on my heel. I scan the roads for Jessica and see her running up the stairs to the ski village. I don’t know where she’s going or why, but I know I must catch up to her, and quickly, while she is still safe. But even so, I look back over my shoulder and say as I go, “I know what I’ve done to you is wrong. But you’ve had hundreds of thousands of people looking to you for answers, and what you’ve given them instead, platitudes and sales pitches and lies—those things are far worse.”
MIA
The real world.
I do deserve it, don’t I?
Tears are rising up in my throat. Tears of anger, tears of frustration, tears of grief. Tears of regret.
In the moment, I turn to the person who has made my real-world life make sense: Dewey. I start to throw my arms around his shoulders for a hug, but he unpeels me and puts my arms at my sides.
“Mia,” he says. His voice is flat. “Is this Tucker?”
Tucker nods. “And who exactly are you?”
Dewey doesn’t answer, saying instead, “Does this phone belong to you?” He holds it out like he can’t stand to hold it another second.
Tucker nods and takes it out of his hand.
“And did that Pictey account that was on screen belong to you?” he asks me.
I nod too.
“Then I think we need to talk.”
“What’s going on?” I ask. “Why are you talking to me like that?”
He shakes his head sadly. “You know how I feel about you. But you said that you had been jilted recently. You said that was why what we were doing here”—he gestures from me to him—“was just a friendship.”
I look at him in shock. “I have. I was. Tell him, Tucker.”
Tucker looks at Dewey. “Who the hell is this guy, Mia?” I notice at once that Dewey is six inches taller than Tucker and twice the man he ever was. I think of how I first imagined having a rebound fling with Dewey, and it seems ridiculous. I don’t know much about basketball, but don’t you only get two points on a rebound? Dewey is like one of those ridiculous halftime shots from the middle where you could win a million dollars.
“This is Dewey,” I tell Tucker. “He’s my friend. I met him after . . . we broke up.”
“So you definitely did break up, then,” says Dewey. “I guess that’s something.”
“Of course we did,” I say. “Why would I lie about that?”
“Because you definitely did lie about that,” he says. “To someone. A lot of someones. Azalea called me while I was walking over from the distillery. She told me you were some kind of internet star and your boyfriend was looking for you. She was confused and upset. I told her it had to be a misunderstanding.”
For a moment I think he’s talking about the hacked posts. I start to point to the hacker sister, but she’s gone. Jessica, who seemed so fragile a moment ago, is gone, too, I realize, in some dim recess of my brain.
But Dewey’s not talking about her anyway. “Just before you and I met on Mount Wyler, you posted that you got married,” says Dewey. “Are you married, or aren’t you?”
“I’m not married,” I tell him urgently. “That post wasn’t real. It was something I had to do in the moment.” But I didn’t have to do it at all, I think now. I told myself I had to, for money, for fear, for the pull of what had become my status quo. Those were all lies.
Dewey isn’t fooled. “You had to tell half a million people you were married and then start something new with me?”
I try to say that I wasn’t starting something with him. But that’s stupid. Of course I was flirting; of course I knew he was flirting back. I may have said one thing about friendship and readiness, but we both knew something was happening, and neither one of us minded one bit. “I had a plan,” I mumble, hearing the falseness in my own words. “A way to clear things up. I just needed time. There were financial considerations, and then there were all those people, with all their expectations.” My voice feels thick as the truth cuts through. “Dewey, there were so many expectations. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“I had some expectations of you too,” says Dewey. “Honesty, for one thing.”
“I’m sorry. In the moment, I was so lost.”
“So you lied,” he says. He is looking down. I can see how disappointed he feels. I’ve lied and been hacked and screwed things up six ways from Sunday. And now Dewey won’t look me in the eye.
“It was complicated,” I say.
“Actually, it’s not that complicated,” interrupts Tucker. It startles me—I’d forgotten he was even here. “Let me break it down for you. Mia is an internet influencer. She makes her living making everything look better than it is. When life gives her lemons, she makes low-sugar pomegranate-lemon iced tea in a canning jar with a compostable spoon. And sorry to break it to you, but she probably was looking for someone to replace me with, and in a hurry too. I mean, here she is with you, some kind of mountain man, two weeks after quote-unquote marrying me. For all we know, she’s about to post that she left me for you.”
“I’m not going to do that,” I try. “I would never do that.” But no one hears. Tucker, scorned and now jealous, talks right over me.
“Soon she’ll be grooming you to make sunset heart hands.” Tucker holds his hands up to his heart in that stupid cliché and looks right at me, and the meanness in his eyes is a hot poker. “I just hope you see through it before you get in too deep.”
Dewey looks from Tucker to me and back. I want to cover Dewey’s eyes and his ears, like he’s a child. It’s all so ugly. It’s not at all true. At least not this time.
Tucker looks Dewey up and down. “You’re going to have to dress better. You need to know that before you get any more involved with her. You’ll never get in front of a camera looking like that.”
“Enough!” I shout, and then to Dewey I say, “There’s nothing wrong with the way you dress. What he says isn’t true. I don’t want you to be part of all that. I don’t want you to have to be on the feed. I don’t wa
nt anything to do with that old life.”
Tucker shakes his head. “Well then,” he says. “Good luck with that, because without the feed, what are you? A washed-up yoga instructor with a dead dog.”
Tears rise up in my eyes, and pain pierces the last bits of me that were still holding firm. “Why did you come here, Tucker? Why are you so dead set on hurting me?” I put my head in my hands, trying to hide my tears, but it doesn’t do any good to hide from this.
“You know what? I don’t know why I came here,” he says. “I don’t know why I thought you had changed at all. I don’t know why I imagined that change would be possible.”
“I did change,” I say through a sob. I swivel around to Dewey, who is looking at me with sad eyes, lost. I am lost too. I don’t know where I am anymore. I don’t know which me is real.
There are a few people standing around staring at me, some taking my picture with their phones as waves of tears seem to spill down my face and drop off my chin. I reach for Dewey, but he shakes his head gently. “I’m sorry, Mia. I need to take this all in,” he says. “I’ve fallen for you, you know that, but I can’t take risks with my heart. Not when I share it with Lea.”
My throat too tight to speak, I can only nod. Nod as he leans forward and wipes one of the droplets off my cheek. “Do what you need to do,” he says in a lower voice so that only I can hear. He gestures to the crowd and to Tucker. “Figure out who you want to be.”
With that, Dewey walks away. In silence I watch him until he is gone, knowing that Azalea will soon be out of my reach too. The hacker and her sister are both gone. And now I see Tucker is walking away, too, head shaking, anger coming off him in waves. “I did change,” I say so loudly I hope they all can hear me, hear me on County AB and on the ski hill and at Pictey headquarters and from coast to goddamned coast. “I changed so much that I can never go back to who I was,” I say, and as I do, I realize that it’s actually the truth.
“I was going to quit it all and start again,” I cry, and now I’m talking only to myself.